Site Mobile Navigation

The Wrong Man

Two days after he replaced a passive George Randolph as the Confederate secretary of war on Nov. 22, 1862, James Seddon took a decisive step — one that, had it played out the way he wanted, could have changed the outcome of the war. Above the two generals currently leading independent armies in the Western Theater, he placed a single commander, Joseph E. Johnston.

National ArchivesJames Seddon, the Confederate secretary of war.

Despite being a Virginian, Seddon was among the first in Richmond to recognize that if Gen. Robert E. Lee failed to win the war in the East, the Confederacy could lose it in the West. Eventually, that’s what happened. Lee did not win a second bid for victory at Gettysburg, but thereafter stalemated Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia. Meanwhile, though, the Union’s successive victories in the West, culminating in Gen. William T. Sherman’s campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas, sealed the Confederacy’s fate. As the historian Albert Castel put it, the Confederacy “needed two Lees. It had but one.”

For a while, though, Seddon hoped that Johnston could fill that role. His selection wasn’t unanimously supported; President Jefferson Davis had misgivings about Johnston, but favored him over Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, Seddon’s likely second choice.

Such consolidation of command was taking place at the top of the Union forces, too. Lincoln solved a similar problem on the opposing side earlier in the year when he gave Gen. Henry Halleck authority over the Tennessee armies of Don Carlos Buell and Ulysses S. Grant. Although headquartered in distant St. Louis, Halleck immediately ordered a previously uncooperative Buell to combine most of his army with Grant’s. Soon after, Grant avoided defeat at the two-day battle of Shiloh at least partly because of the arrival of Buell’s reinforcements at the close of the first day.

But if Johnston was no Robert E. Lee, he also failed to match the decisiveness of an otherwise unexceptional Henry Halleck. Unlike Halleck, who promptly issued effective orders, Johnston complained and equivocated. Rather than finding solutions, he spent his time worrying over problems. Even before arriving at his Chattanooga, Tenn., headquarters, he wrote that the two commanders he would now lead, John C. Pemberton and Braxton Bragg, could not possibly support each other, since their forces were separated by the Tennessee River, where regular Union gunboat patrols could imperil Confederate troop crossings, while the roundabout railroad route connecting the two armies was too lengthy — despite the fact that Bragg had used the route the previous summer to move rapidly from northern Mississippi to Chattanooga.

Library of CongressGen. Joseph E. Johnston

More ominously, Johnston grumbled that he was uncertain of his authority, even after Seddon repeatedly explained the general had full command over all military operations in his district. He could even assume personal command of either army, should he decide it was necessary. At Seddon’s suggestion, President Davis wrote Johnston confirming what the secretary had told him. But Johnston simply wouldn’t act. Consequently, Pemberton and Bragg occasionally reported directly to Richmond and Johnston, creating predictable confusion.

Perhaps Johnston’s trepidation was a personality trait; an episode earlier in his life certainly suggests so. Upon learning of Johnston’s reputation as a crack shot, an acquaintance invited him on a quail hunt. Most of the times when the covey rose up, Johnston failed to fire, explaining that the birds were too far away, or screened by brush, or the sun was in his eyes. His host concluded Johnston wouldn’t take a shot unless conditions were nearly perfect.

Characteristically, Johnston met the first crisis in his new district by doing nothing. In December 1862 Pemberton called for reinforcements because Vicksburg, Miss., was threatened by Sherman from the west and Grant from the north. This was precisely the type of situation that Johnston was expected to manage. Yet he declined to send reinforcements because he speculatively assumed that they could not reach Mississippi in time. Fortunately, Pemberton defeated Sherman at the Battle of Chickasaw Bluffs, Miss., while his cavalry forced Grant to retreat by destroying the federal supply depot at Holly Springs, Miss.

Nor was Johnston better at managing destructive personality clashes among commanders within the nearby Army of Tennessee, as became evident that winter. After losing the Battle of Perryville in Kentucky under General Bragg, the army returned to Tennessee with a bitterly divided general staff. Leonidas K. Polk, Edmund Kirby-Smith and William J. Hardee were ringleaders of an anti-Bragg cabal threatening to undermine the army’s morale. Seddon hoped that Johnston would either use his influence to gain cooperation from the malcontents or assume command of Bragg’s army. He did neither.

Following the Battle of Stones River that straddled New Year’s Day, Richmond heard further complaints about Bragg from subordinates — a perfect opportunity for Johnston to either take field command of Bragg’s army, as Halleck did of Grant’s after Shiloh, or disarm the complainers. Seddon even ordered Johnston to conduct a personal investigation of the Army of Tennessee and provide a full report to Richmond. But the report was not what the secretary expected: Johnston described conditions in Bragg’s army in glowing terms, specifically endorsing the “great vigor and skill” of the commander. He advised Seddon not to relieve Bragg, but he added, lamely, that if Seddon or Davis felt otherwise, “no one … engaged in this investigation ought to be his successor” — by which he meant, of course, himself.

While declining to assume major responsibilities, Johnston used his authority for one innovation that ultimately proved catastrophic. He was impressed that, by burning the federal supply depot at Holly Springs, a force of only 3,000 horsemen under Gen. Earl Van Dorn was able to force Grant to abandon his overland march to Vicksburg. This represented a new role for cavalry; previously, Confederate cavalry had been used for reconnaissance and for raids that were never large enough to thwart a major offensive. Johnston proposed to combine half of Bragg’s horsemen with most of Pemberton’s to form a cavalry force under Van Dorn which would swoop deep behind Union lines to attack vulnerable supply chains. Such a force might not merely delay the enemy’s advance, but could be powerful enough to stall the progress of Union armies indefinitely.

While the arrangement led to future decades of fireside tales about daring, lightning strikes by Confederate cavalry veterans, it also stripped Pemberton of adequate forces for reconnaissance. Furthermore, Grant trumped the strategy by using invulnerable river transports to carry and supply his soldiers to the Louisiana shore opposite Vicksburg. Once they arrived across the Mississippi River from the Confederate fortress in April 1863, Pemberton was in a fog about the federal army’s future movements. Grant subsequently crossed the river, captured and destroyed Jackson, Miss., to cut off Vicksburg’s supply lines and laid siege to Pemberton’s army. His 30,000 Confederates surrendered on July 4, 1863.

Related

Once Grant crossed the river, Seddon ordered the hesitant Johnston to take command in Mississippi and sent him reinforcements to rescue Pemberton. Had the two rebel generals been able to link their separate commands before the end of May 1863, their combined forces would have been a match for Grant’s 50,000 troops. But predictably, Johnston didn’t move fast enough, even as Pemberton was clumsily trying to comply with Johnston’s order to move on Grant’s rear. And, for the six weeks of the Vicksburg siege, Johnston did little but keep his army nearby, waiting for a favorable opportunity that never came.

By the end of May ’63, Johnston’s performance led Seddon to conclude the general would fail to meet his expectations, but it was too late for a replacement to redeem the situation in Mississippi. Consequently, the secretary concluded the best presently available hope for independence lay with the Army of Northern Virginia. During a May 26 meeting of the Confederate cabinet, Seddon backed Lee’s plan to invade the North, hoping that the general could seal a victory in the East before Johnston lost it in the West.

Phil Leigh is an armchair Civil War enthusiast and president of a market research company. He is preparing an illustrated and annotated version of the memoirs of Confederate Pvt. Sam Watkins, which will be released by Westholme Publishing next spring entitled “Co. Aytch: Illustrated and Annotated.”

What's Next

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.